Reading With the Stars

At Cara's elementary school they have a program called Reading With the Stars that encourages the kids to read and read and read and read and if you read enough you get a voucher for two free tickets to a Dallas Stars game. Cara loves to read and read and read and after a friend gave her an extra voucher we found ourselves with four tickets to last night's Dallas Stars hockey game. Our neighbors were also going and we agreed that taking the train in would be fun and cost less than gas & parking so we all went together. This was our first mistake...

Game time was at 7:30. Bryan works in downtown Dallas and we agreed he would just meet us there. The girls and I got talked into taking the 5:52 train which would put us at the American Airlines Center close to 6:30. This equates to sitting around for at least an hour before the game starts - hard enough for an adult to do. Now think about a 4-year-old, named Jordyn, whom we love dearly...

To pass the time I took advantage of being able to text the jumbo screen and have our message (Hi Cara, Jordyn, Gabrielle and Brenna!) played over and over again. The girls loved seeing their names scroll by! It was kinda fun reading other people's messages too. One of them asked a girl to the prom. There were birthday and anniversary well-wishers. Another one said "I want to see Ott get into a fight tonight." This actually did happen - there were two fights one of which looked so planned and fake it was very odd to say the least...

We discovered that 'free' tickets are free for a reason. Our tickets were in Section 334. This is the highest section number they have in the AA Center. Row G is one row from the tippy-top. Can you say nosebleed section? Seriously. We did have a clear view of everything that was going on so that was nice! But when you're that high up there's no chance of catching a t-shirt shot into into the stands by an air gun or a Chipotle coupon dropped from a huge balloon shaped like a red chile, is there?

Our view from our seats - tiny little guys, huh?
Eating cotton candy... Can you see Bryan? :)

So five minutes into the first period Jordy's already had enough and asks if it's time to go home yet. Sweet. Mind you her adventure had started two hours earlier... This leads to two more hours of her crawling all over us and trying to go sit with random strangers who smiled at her. We thought we could take the train home at any time but were WRONG about that as the first train out of there was scheduled for 20 minutes after the game was over. Okay, now we're stuck. We end up staying for the whole game - which Dallas lost, by the way - riding the train back to our van and did not get home until 11:20 PM - on a school night! Do we win parents of the year awards, or what??

The girls (Brenna, Cara, Gabrielle & Jordyn) on the train ride home.

I know I made this sound like it was a horrible night. It wasn't! We did have fun together as a family and strengthened our relationship with our neighbors. I think next time, though, the money used from driving our own car and arriving and leaving when we want to will be money well spent. :)